July 2018

When a seven-member team of young psychologists of the ‘Koshish Project’ of the Tata Institute of Social Sciences (TISS) landed in Bihar last October for a social audit, they had little idea that they would end up exposing a sordid tale of sexual abuse of the scale that has surfaced.

A few months ago, on the initiative of the Bihar government, the Tata Institute of Social Sciences (TISS) conducted a social audit of children homes in Bihar. The Koshish unit of TISS visited 110 children homes in 38 districts of Bihar and submitted the audit report to the Department of Social Welfare on April 27, 2018. Koshish mainly works on urban poverty.

The report also stated that the conditions at some of the shelter homes were coercive to the extent that the inmates have committed suicide to escape the pressure

I humbly submit that no female or male child in this country is safe from prying predators at school, street or confines of own home. Nonetheless, even compared with dismal national record, the Muzaffarpur saga must make us as a nation collectively put our head to shame.

Cut off from their families and without any source of income, it took over two months of struggle and a petition to the Bombay high court to establish that those detained were not “beggars” but in fact the homeless poor struggling to meet their ends by selling stuff on the street and doing odd jobs.